Supreme Court Data (2015)

15 Dec 2015

Here’s a supercut of all the mentions of the word “data” in last week’s Supreme Court Oral Arguments in Evenwel v. Abbott, a case addressing the question of whether the “one-person, one-vote” principle of the Equal Protection Clause allows states to use total population data instead of voter population data in apportioning legislative districts.

Turns out, “data” came up a lot!

This follows a supercut last year of mentions of the word “cloud” in the ABC v. Aereo argument, “Supreme Court Clouds (2014)”. The process of making this video was largely similar, though I’ve traded in mencoder for ffmpeg for cutting up, modifying, and muxing the video.

This time I thought it’d be nice to include some background music, so I turned to the public domain recordings of various Chopin compositions, created by Musopen. For the video, I used a segment of a 1958 educational film about computers made by IBM and sourced from the Prelinger Archive.

Both media sources, as well as the Supreme Court audio, are public domain. (All for different reasons, too: the music because of an intentional waiver of rights; the video because it was not noticed-and-registered and was made in an era that required formalities; and the courtroom audio because of § 105 barring federal employees from copyright on their official work.)